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Legal acts performed by EU Member States applying Union law come within the scope of the Convention and can give rise to adjudication by the ECtHR. A long series of judgments illus-trate the ECtHR’s approach regarding the application of Union law by the courts of EU Mem-ber States. The Convention and Union law are not two autonomous systems separated by a watertight fence. Both European Courts should therefore adopt a wholistic approach in this area, because only a wholistic view takes full account of the legal reality which is one of inter-action and intertwining. The ECtHR makes abundant use of EU law sources, thereby always explicitly referring to them. Three different categories of cases can be identified in how the CJEU goes about the Convention in its case-law.
Rafał Lemkin (1900-1959): A life-long story of engagement in the development of human rights law
(2023)
This blog post aims to provide a brief overview of the life and work of Rafał Lemkin by ex-ploring his participation in the interwar and post-war international dialogue. It demonstrates a variety of means, including academic activities (research, publications, conferences), as well as diplomacy and personal relationships, which Lemkin used to disseminate his ideas and research. Despite having limited resources and being a refugee for much of his life, Lemkin drew upon his linguistic abilities and showed himself to be an extraordinary “constant negotiator”. His varied work experience, gained in the early stages of his career in Lviv and Warsaw, likely aided him in developing an inclusive perspective on law and human rights that later informed his ground-breaking work on genocide.
Two different States licensed exports of intrusion tools and related items to a third State. That State then used it to spy on human rights defenders, lawyers, journalists, activists, opposition politicians, and dissidents. While one of the licensing States is a member of the Wassenaar Arrangement, the other is not but had declared to follow it unilaterally. The legal analysis considers the attribution of the relevant acts and omissions by the States and examines possible breaches of international export control law and international human rights law.
Can parliament govern the transport transition? How the German Bundestag scrutinizes rail projects
(2022)
The paper aims to elucidate to what extent the German Parliament exerts control over rail planning. Parliament has the budgetary right, but information asymmetries vis-à-vis the railway company Deutsche Bahn and the Ministry of Transport make parliamentary control difficult.
Recently, Germany has instituted a parliamentary review process that allows the Parliament to take up concerns by the public affected by rail projects. We use the principal-agent theory to model this new institution. Parliament delegates rail planning to the Deutsche Bahn, while the Federal Railway Authority serves as a budget watchdog, and parliament uses input from public participation as a deck-stacking procedure. The paper first situates the institutional innovations—the new parliamentary oversight procedure—against the former logic of rail-way planning. Second, based on the documentation of parliamentary oversight, we analyze for which demands by the affected public the Parliament uses its power to change rail projects.
The paper showed that public participation matters. The German Parliament introduced expensive changes to rail projects. In particular, demands that had been voiced in well-institutionalized public participation (that is, when municipalities, regional associations, etc., were engaged in long-term institutionalized dialogues with the Deutsche Bahn) were more likely to be addressed. An Extra budget was then allocated to, for example, noise-regulating measures.
To sum up, the German Parliament uses information gained in public participation in com-bination with its budget rights to exert control over railway planning for conflictual projects. Thus, Parliament takes a more active role in railway planning. Whether this also leads to more acceptance for rail projects, is an open question.
The picture regarding the protection of fundamental rights in Europe today increasingly looks like a patchwork, due to a lack of coordination at different levels. Developments reinforcing that picture include the emergence of different methodologies for the application of funda-mental rights, Constitution-based challenges to European law by national Supreme Courts, codifications of existing case-law and the creation of so-called « hybrid » institutions. The resulting complexity is a challenge for domestic courts, a threat to the confidence of citizens and detrimental to the fundamental rights themselves, their special role and authority being gradually eroded by a general relativism. EU-accession could have an anti-patchwork effect and represent a chance for a general coordination of fundamental rights in Europe. Beyond making the Convention binding upon the EU, it would also have a pan-European (re)structu-ring effect by confirming the Convention as the minimum benchmark providing both the bedrock and the framework for any other national or European fundamental rights as well as for the necessary judicial dialogue on the latter. Good progress has been achieved since the resumption of negotiations for EU-accession, justifying cautious optimism as to the possibility to find adequate solutions to the outstanding issues.
Whether sovereign rights under the Convention on the Continental Shelf and the Convention on the Territorial Sea and the Contiguous Zone were conferred on the nation state or the nation’s constituent states.
Whether the states of a federation had international personality, or only the federation itself.
Whether a person who worked as an ‘expert on mission’ for the United Nations outside his home state was acting as an ‘official’ for the United Nations within the meaning of the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations and was, therefore, exempt from taxation by his home state.
For centuries, export control regulations have accompanied the development of new weapon technologies. The revelations of the ‘Pegasus Project’ have put the question of whether and how to regulate the export of the new technology ‘cyberweapons’ in the limelight: Is the current international export control law up to the challenge of sufficiently regulating the proliferation of ‘cyberweapons’ or does it need an update? To answer this question, the blog post will, first, turn to the definition and relevance of ‘cyberweapons’. Secondly, international export control law is introduced as a possible measure to mitigate the risks posed by ‘cyberweapons’ against the backdrop of regulating the use of ‘cyberweapons’ or establishing a moratorium on its trade. Third, the blog post will assess the export of ‘cyberweapons’ in general and the export of Pegasus in particular within the current international export control framework. The current framework seems to touch upon partial aspects of the trade with ‘cyberweapons’. However, it stands to fear that it is not up to the task of sufficiently curtailing the proliferation of ‘cyberweapons’ and the associated risks, as it especially leaves the underlying problem of the trade with zero-day vulnerabilities untouched.